"I read the way one might stroll. … I feel myself to be a sacred trespasser…"
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Whenever I find myself growing dissatisfied, it isn’t long before I start to point a finger at the nearest stack of books. The symptom is always the same: after fifteen or fifty pages, I toss them aside with the full knowledge that the failure may be mine, this inability to meet expectations. Weeks, sometimes months, pass before I can define the problem. It’s something primal, a longing that’s easier to describe to an addict than someone who doesn’t recognize literature as a lifeline.
I spent much of the past three months preparing for an on-stage interview at the Auckland Writers Festival with Johnson, who died on Wednesday, May 24. He cancelled his appearance several weeks before the festival, but it was a great pleasure—and often an education—to read and reread his books and prepare for the meeting.
This (for now) is less about Denis Johnson than about the way that following our favorite authors opens unexpected conversations, permitting chance encounters with writers we otherwise might not have met. It’s like one friend guaranteeing that we’ll enjoy the company of another.
My start-of-the-year reading of Johnson’s work opened the door to Leonard Gardner and his slim masterpiece Fat City (1969).
© Jennifer Levasseur & Kevin Rabalais. All rights reserved.
